“You Day”: How Governments Are Quietly Erasing Mothers and Fathers

What kind of world are we creating when “Mother” becomes a slur and “Father” a microaggression? How does it follow, then, that “Mother’s Day” needs to be renamed “You Day” to make anyone feel included? The Netherlands’ Ministry of Education has just spent €40,000 instructing civil servants to do exactly that.

Under the guise of fighting “discrimination and racism,” Dutch officials are being told to scrub “mother” and “father” from official communications in favour of sanitized, parent-free alternatives. The goal? “Inclusion.” The reality? The erasure of everyday families and the norms that hold society together. This is the epitome of ideological capture.

What’s actually at stake here are parental rights: fundamental, pre-political rights that existed prior to any government and cannot be created or abolished by legislative decree. They cannot be bargained away through a style guide. And yet, that is precisely what is being quietly dismantled, not through dramatic legislation, but through language guides and bureaucratic updates, until “mother” and “father” feel unusual, then uncomfortable, then gone.

Whilst I wish this was solely a Dutch problem, it’s actually a growing pattern globally.

At the international level, the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes the family as “the natural and fundamental group unit of society.” Binding treaties, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and Articles 5 and 18 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, also reinforce that parents, not the state, are the primary caregivers and decision-makers in a child’s life. Despite the existence of these documents, certain actors within the UN system are quietly pushing to replace the legal definition of family with a “community-based arrangement,” a deliberately vague formulation designed to dissolve the family as a protected institution entirely.

Each step, from scrubbing parental language in government documents to rebranding Mother’s Day, is presented as modest and inclusive. Each step is anything but. A pro-parent society speaks plainly: mothers and fathers matter, and the government works for families, not the other way around.

My message to every parent is simply this: the titles of “mom” and “dad” aren’t relics to be managed, they’re a testament to the most distinctive and consequential role any person can hold, because you are actively raising the next generation and shaping the world they will inherit.

Thank you for your support.

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